Synack Red Team: Strategic Operations

Share

At Synack, we work hard to provide the best vulnerability discovery platform available and ensure our customers’ expectations are exceeded by the results delivered in our red team assessments. But the heart of Synack is in the researchers that make up the Synack Red Team. To capture the attention of the highest caliber researchers in the world is one thing. Keeping them engaged and passionate about your program is another. This is why Synack has invested not just in hiring a Community Manager, but in building a Strategic Operations team devoted entirely to the researcher experience.

Strategic Operations is more than just a fancy title for Community Outreach. Yes, we have a Twitter account and attend conferences to meet researchers. And yes, we even give out t-shirts from time to time. But our real goal is to make the Synack Red Team experience the best in the industry. This is a hard-core operational team designed to maximize researcher efficiency and payouts. We assist researchers through the selective application and onboarding process and are dedicated advocates for SRT Members. We design incentive programs, retention programs, are developing technical training offerings for SRT members, and are working on platform improvements that will increase researcher success. On top of that, we make it a point to personally contact our members on a regular basis to check in on how they are, and ask their feedback on what Synack is doing well or could improve on, and ensure that we are exceeding their expectations.

As you can see, Strategic Operations is a lot more than just sponsoring the right conferences or publishing interesting tweets. It is about improving customer satisfaction and increasing efficiencies to drive down the operational cost for both customers and the business. In this case, the team’s customers are security researchers, and my goal is to help them get the most out of their SRT experience.

The SRT Strategic Operations team is growing, but the current members include:

Kymberlee Price is the Director of Synack Red Team Strategic Operations, where she leads the team responsible for Synack Red Team management, Security Response, and vulnerability metrics analysis programs. With eleven years of information security experience, Kymberlee pioneered the first security researcher outreach program in the software industry at Microsoft. She most recently spent four years on the front lines of mobile security response in BlackBerry’s Security Incident Response team, handling risk assessment of high severity vulnerabilities reported in BlackBerry products.

Sam Houston is a Community Manager in SRT Strategic Operations, bringing extensive experience managing online communities at Secret, Couchsurfing, and GamerDNA, as well as in social media management and customer feedback aggregation. Sam will be leading our SRT retention and social media initiatives.